You're An Extremist, Too

Peter Hitchens is so good this week that I all that I can do is to reproduce him in full:

I think we would be a happier country if we had never encouraged mass immigration in the post-war era. The fact that it is almost taboo to say [hardly!] this simple thing is an example of the problems it has caused.

But I also grasp that the immigration has happened, that we have new neighbours, and that it is our absolute duty to get on with them and befriend them as best as we can.

And this is why I am so scornful of the windbags and panic-spreaders who now seek to make an issue out of the supposed takeover of some state schools by Muslims. 

What twaddle this is. The Government quite rightly allows Christian schools in the state system – not least because it was the churches who took  on the job of educating poor children when politicians couldn’t be bothered to do so.

Well, now we have a large number of Muslim parents, how can we reasonably deny them the same?

I have a lot of quarrels with Islam, but I, and many traditional British Christians like me, have a lot in common with Muslims.

We dislike the pressure on teenage girls to dress as sluts and get drunk, and the pressure on teenage boys to be oafish copies of football stars.

We think it’s time the old were respected and cared for, not dumped and abandoned.

We’d much rather our children went on religious pilgrimages than to a Britney Spears concert.

We see nothing shocking in the idea of boys and girls being taught separately – many  people pay good money for single-sex education because they think it better, and because state schools mostly refuse to provide it any more.

We don’t especially want schoolteachers to undermine our views on marriage and child-rearing in politically radical ‘sex-education’ classes. Not everyone shares the liberal elite’s views of these matters.

We believe – because we’re British and we’ve heard of Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and Habeas Corpus – in freedom of speech and religion.

So when we’re told that this is ‘extremism’, then we tend to think that in that case we, too, are ‘extremists’. The word means nothing except ‘person holding unfashionable views’.

It means even less than the foggy, squelchy ‘British values’ Michael Gove says we must espouse.

Both Mr Gove and the Home Secretary, Theresa May, have in practice supported the transformation of this country into  a borderless, multicultural, multi-faith zone.

Much of what was left of Christian teaching in state schools was stripped out of them years ago by secular radicals, so that our national faith is now taught as a sort of eccentric tribal cult, practised by other people, especially old people, if it is mentioned at all.

The ‘Conservative’ party, true to its long record of cowardice and retreat, never did anything to stop this. Now it seeks to appear concerned by blurring the border between religious fervour and terrorist crime.

How dare either, or both, of these politicians now seek to advance their political careers by posing as the foes of ‘Islamic extremism’?

If there is such a thing, their party brought it here and encouraged its growth.

The main thing to note about this pair is their behaviour proves the Tory Party doesn’t believe its own propaganda about winning in 2015.

They know there’ll be a vacancy for Leader of the Opposition next May, when a defeated David Cameron quits.

That’s what they’re really fighting about.

Your wars cause rape, Mr Hague

Wars turn men into barbarians, and bring rape.

This is a simple, cruel fact known to the many peoples who have had to endure invasion, occupation and subjugation, not to mention ethnic cleansing, in Europe, Asia and Africa.

Just ask all women of a certain age in Berlin what happened to them at the hands of our gallant Soviet Allies in 1945.

Angelina Jolie is an actress and can be pardoned for not knowing very much about the hard, real world.

But William Hague is a historian and politician. He has no excuse for his fatuous parading about, pretending that bits of noble prose can change the way men act in war.

If Mr Hague wants to see less rape, then he should stop prancing about, fulminating bombastically about Libya, Syria and Ukraine, trying to start wars, which seems to be his main diversion these days.

It is as simple as that. There must be some other way he can get his picture taken next to Angelina.

Talk about politics being showbusiness for ugly people.

A fearless force we cannot control

As one who opposed the Iraq War at the time, I must confess to getting some satisfaction from reminding people about it now, as the result of our stupid, predictably ruinous intervention descends from disaster to cataclysm.

Even now, various warmongers are scuttling around urging the futile use of airpower and drones against this great and furious force (which we have aroused) of embittered Sunni Muslim fanaticism.

Face it, we have lost any influence over this part of the world, for many years to come.

When are we going to grow up and realise that we have neither the right nor the power to go round invading other countries and telling them how to run their affairs?

What exactly is it that we have to offer them anyway?

Lady Gaga, Facebook, Britain’s Got Talent and Game Of Thrones, plus mass divorce and abortion, legalised dope and Jägerbombs?

Oh, yes, and our miraculous multi-party democracy, in which all the parties are the same?

And our secret courts, lying statistics and unpayable debts?

If it weren’t for the fact that we are (so far) better-equipped for war, they’d have us by the throat. As Churchill wrote in 1899 after praising Muslims as ‘brave and loyal soldiers’ who ‘know how to die’:

Islam ‘is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step, and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome’.

I don’t agree with that bit about Christianity struggling against science. It’s not true. But the rest of it is so.

We have relied too much on what Kipling called ‘reeking tube and iron shard’ in his great, prophetic warning of the end of Empire, the poem Recessional.

Now the world is rapidly passing into the control of others, and we had better hope they are kinder to us than we have been to them.

***

When I make jokes, people think I’m being serious. When I’m being serious, they think I’m joking.

For example, people laugh when I say that our governing class don’t believe in prisons and only keep them going for fear of public opinion.

Well, now it’s been revealed that almost 90 criminals (some very violent) have quietly vanished from Ford Open Prison and are living undetected among us, please don’t laugh.

It is deadly serious, and a sign of a much deeper, well-hidden problem.